Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (2018) — a book review

15 May 2018

A conventionally "neoliberal" call to American hope

Professor Jon Meacham evidently went out of his way not to offend too many people with this scattered and analytically superficial, but nevertheless respect-worthy book.

The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (Merewether, 2018) is essentially a compendium of inspiring quotations regarding the process and content of American governance. Dr. Meacham is an eloquent, if not well organized, writer.

In spite of the following mostly negative critique, I recommend the book to historically inclined, Establishment-leaning readers.

Meacham begins with a swipe at President Trump — and implicitly calls for patiently active resistance until times change

The way in which Jon Meacham organized the book leads me to suspect that he thinks the nation would have been better off with Hillary Clinton at its post-2016 helm.

He starts with President Trump's reaction to Charlottesville's "Unite the Right" rally in August 2017:

[T]he president of the United States — himself an heir to the white populist tradition of [Strom] Thurmond and of Alabama's George Wallace — said that there had been an "egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides," as if there were more than one side to a conflict between neo-Nazis who idolized Adolf Hitler and Americans who stood against Ku Klux Klansmen and white nationalists.

The remarks were of a piece with the incumbent president's divisive language on immigration (among many other subjects, from political foes to women) and his nationalist rhetoric.

Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress — a period like our own.

The good news is that we have come through such darkness before.

In the best of moments, witness, protest, and resistance can intersect with the leadership of an American president to lift us to higher ground.

In darker times, if a particular president fails to advance the national story — or, worse, moves us backward — then those who witness, protest, and resist must stand fast, in hope, working toward a better day.

Progress in American life, as we will see, has been slow, painful, bloody, and tragic.

In beginning this way, we begin to see Soul of America's main flaw — superficiality

Professor Meacham's story alerts us to the fact that bad things have happened before, yet we are still here. This historical gleaning, he asserts, provides a hopeful message.

What Meacham misses, in my more communitarian view, is focusing on the mechanics of how our System imprisons us in conditions that are "slow, painful, bloody, and tragic."

American culture essentially fights the same battles over and over again, without making substantial progress. Not even according to Meacham's own "liberal" measures of social value. Some of which include his perceptive emphasis on "the pursuit of happiness" as a fundamental American value.

One would think that an inquisitive historian would ask why these repeated failures (in making substantial progress toward "happiness") characterize our culture.

Implicitly blaming human nature, as Meacham does with his fear hypothesis, is not enough. One of the professor's certainly correct points is that the Founders sought to build a system that kept these destructive impulses in check.

So, why haven't those checks — and the freedoms they theoretically afford us — ever worked adequately, when push comes to shove?

This question is, it seems to me as a once historian myself, inescapable. Yet Meacham dodges it.

For example — on race

Dr. Meacham spends most of Soul of America addressing race. This, via the presumably optimistic slant provided by quotations taken from our history's sprinkling of luminous reformers. Their insights and calls to action are undeniably inspiring.

What Meacham loses in his too scattered compilation of these remembrances is any credible explanation of why he thinks that racial justice is substantively much more advanced now, than it was hundreds of years ago.

Meacham's (white-ish) idea of patiently acquired social progress would challenge even a haloed saint's fortitude.

Hold that thought in the back of your mind. It becomes pertinent a few paragraphs from now.

Similar analytical deficiencies abound with regard to the United States' increasingly tyrannical trend

Professor Meacham's optimistic message — which I paraphrase as an invitation to "tirelessly resist with patience" — fails to grapple with the oppressive nature of our plutocratically oligarchical system.

Soul of America hints not at all at how massive corporatism and looted wealth have commandeered all our institutions. This capture makes them largely impervious to the corrective changes that Meacham implies are still possible.

Forced equivalence of past and present

Professor Meacham seems to hypothesize that things now are (structurally and populationally) like things then.

He suggests that even today, we can accomplish temporary escapes from the vicious moron-i-tudes that we have faced before.

Meacham's legitimately taken caveat (to his optimism) is that preserving Liberty is a continual struggle.

Even with the "struggle" aphorism accepted, many historians and political scientists would quarrel with Dr. Meacham's implied equivalence of past and present. What was possible in less interrelated and networked bygone days may not be institutionally achievable in modernity.

Another hint regarding Meacham's lack of societally penetrating insight is his willingness to take presidents at their (usually eloquent) and (commonly hypocritically disregarded) word.

He frequently glosses over the fact that proportionately few of these most powerful people did impressively much in the direction they said or implied that they would. Presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson and Abraham Lincoln are the book's two most admirably extreme counter-current exceptions.

In that vein, my patience with Soul of America's intellectual lightness reached its limit, when Meacham started quoting former President Barack Obama — perhaps the nation's most hypocritically vile chief executive — on the subject of God's grace.

Following the shooting massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston (South Carolina) President Obama said:

"According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned.

"Grace is not merited. It's not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. . . . God has visited grace upon us for he has allowed us to see where we've been blind. He has given us the chance, where we've been lost, to find our best selves.

"For too long, we've been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present.

"Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty or attend dilapidated schools or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career. Perhaps it causes us to examine what we're doing to cause some of our children to hate."

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Obama began to sing the old hymn [Amazing Grace].

Meacham follows this with not a word about Obama's self-serving, plutocratic undercutting of virtually everything he ever said (or ignored) about morality, race and American peacefulness.

On the subject of President Obama's moral emptiness, as well as his duplicitously unprincipled political opportunism, I agree with the pejorative conclusions reached by:

Professors Cornel West and Noam Chomsky

seminarian journalist Chris Hedges

and

Black Agenda Report editors Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon and Margaret Kimberley.

In my estimation, Professor Meacham's failure to meaningfully examine Obama's destructive hypocrisy indicates how little he can be trusted to insightfully reveal what is institutionally wrong with the American system. Or with the society that fosters it.

In fairness, the Obama quote arguably does illustrate Meacham's point that when an elevated-sounding president and the public come together, something better might happen.

What is missing, though, is analysis of whether this coming together regularly accomplishes anything substantively long-lasting.

In Obama's case, certainly it did not. Indeed, some of us think that President Obama and his predecessors' morally miserable presidential performances contributed to the backlash that we are experiencing in the shape of the Trump presidency.

Not a word, however, about this systemic flaw from Professor Meacham.

Public and president coming together, as Mecham hypothesizes happens in more elevated times, has displayed a convincing lack of lasting and societally penetrating accomplishments (in many respects) for more than two centuries.

Civil rights are a good example. It is difficult for me to see major advances in implementing freedom and economic justice for all people in the American paradigm, as it has been historically practiced.

Today, in illustration, we have replaced lynching African-Americans with having the criminal justice system shoot or disproportionately imprison them. And White Man's economics still disfavor that long-oppressed group of people.

And so on.

Here, repeating myself for emphasis, Professor Meacham avoids the foundational problem of why everything American is "slow, painful, bloody, and tragic."

Isn't dealing with that issue a basic requirement for meaningfully writing about the possibility of historically flowing, soulfully positive change?

One would think so.

Hence, my labeling of Dr. Meacham as a probable neoliberal. The way things are on their better days in the United States is, we are left to infer, okay with him.

Other Soul of America flaws

Going hand in hand with missing the point of writing history — of the message-laden kind that Meacham presumably wanted to — his book suffers from atrocious organization.

Chronology repeatedly jumps around without decipherable reason. And the relationship of (a) each chapter's supposed subject matter to (b) the book's stated theme is almost always never properly explained.

My guess is that Meacham rather casually cobbled this book out of previous writings about other subjects and themes. He is emphatically not a logician given to making tightly constructed, reasoned arguments.

Footnotes are just okay — the book's index not so much

This book indulges the irritating habit of not numbering footnotes. Those are relegated to the end pages, where you have to find the appropriate page number and then guess which entry refers to which statement. That's imprecise, time-wasting and unscholarly.

The index is erratically worse. Subjects detailed at length in the text are often absent.

The moral? — Good compendium of quotations, but analytically superficial

Though I admire Dr. Meacham's scholarship and his on-television intellect, penetrating analysis is evidently not his forte.

That said, laissez faire capitalists will welcome The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels.

The book is essentially a placating call to American "sheep" to actively resist peacefully. Though perhaps while belabored and beaten, as they were on Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday (07 March 1965). In this resistive mode, we must wait for better days and better leadership.

Those more golden days, according to Meacham, will structurally consist of the communion of a morally reawakened populace and a times-aware and ethically attuned president.

However, from my characteristically realistic and statistically aware point of view, those better times — given the fundamental nature of our System — will never substantively arrive. At least, not until we change the United States' political, economic and social infrastructure.

Soul of America demonstrates this deflating point. Muffed post-Civil War reconstruction, the "Lost Cause" and decades of the Jim Crow backlash reversed — even through today — most of what had been theoretically gained during the Civil War.

The same thing can be said of the American economy, which is in 2018 just as Robber Baron owned as it ever has been.

We could go on with similar examples.

A markedly less Establishment-oriented historian than Jon Meacham might have addressed these issues. A brilliant one, certainly so.

There is a difference between eloquently sifting History's tidbits and putting them together into decisively penetrating and action-sustaining form. Professor Meacham does the former with genuine genius. His mind and heart, however, appear not to be in the latter.

Meacham plays the role of the Pleasant Historian. I hypothesize that he is reluctant to cut his access to prominent Establishment people. This placating trait is equally apparent in his biography of former President George H. W. Bush.

Above negatives aside, if you are neoliberal reader with a tendency toward optimism, Soul of America is an eminently worthy book. It eloquently and voluminously supplies an impressive string of mood-elevating quotations. Professor Meacham's admirable scholarship provides genuine value to those with an interest in American culture.

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Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (2018) — a book review